Meetings

We have a project meeting twice a month on Tuesday at 17:00 UTC in the #themereview channel on Slack. Second Tuesday in the month is open floor and the fourth Tuesday is with a fixed agenda. Tuesday at 17:00 UTC.

Discussion about allowing themes to use onboarding functionality

A few weeks ago, in a meeting, we were talking about allowing onboarding functionality and we had an interesting suggestion to make a guest post on the blog. Your opinions on this topic are welcomed.

Author: Themeisle

Discuss setup/onboarding wizard guidelines for themes

Hello! We would like to bring into discussion our approach for onboarding users for our one page theme, Neve, which is submitted for review here https://themes.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/60623.

We would like to know TRT’s opinion, and hopefully, through an open discussion with users and theme authors, find better ways of onboarding users, in every theme. Our solution is not perfect, but we think it’s a good starting point for this discussion.

The mechanism

Immediately after activating the theme, you are taken to the Setup Wizard where you are presented with some demos that you can preview or/and import with a single click. The wizard takes you through all the necessary steps to set up your site fast, from just one place!
The wizard is dismissable, so you can choose to use it, or just skip it.

https://prnt.sc/l670pk

Our reasons

1. Not all the themes are the same, and because of that, we feel that theme authors (same as plugin authors) should be able to guide their users towards the best UX path possible.
In the case of a One Page theme, there is no point in enabling latest posts as default, as 99% of the users actually want the One Page frontpage.
In the case of Neve, we have built a theme with multiple potential front-pages, this is how the theme is presented and what the users expect to get from it.

2. If this is a problem, we can make much clear/easier to understand in the onboarding that the user can keep the latest posts option, maybe add a “standard” site library that user can pick and be directed to the customizer for e.g, like “I want the default blog listing frontpage”. If we auto-start without this option, we agree it might get a bit confusing.

3. WooCommerce is already doing this and we think they have a good reason for it ( or they don’t know what’s best for their users ).
Allowing theme authors to do this, would allow us to do lots of things for an improved UX, guide users with not only the demos sites but maybe with the style, fonts, plugins and much more. Sure, we would first need to agree that WordPress core hasn’t adapted to new WordPress uses, otherwise this should have been already there, but at least as plugin authors can, we think we should leave theme authors deliver the best UX for each particular theme.

4. We found out that 99% of the existing Neve sites use the demo provided in the onboarding. We think this is a good indicator of what the users actually want, and think that requiring 99% of the users to take an extra step to set up their site, only so that the remaining 1% don’t have to take an extra step of skipping the onboarding is not in the best interest of the user.

Due to the fact that WordPress itself does not provide any built-in mechanisms for guiding users, I think this approach should be somewhat standardized and everyone should use the same, so as to reduce confusion among users.
We all know that many .org users will try out 5-10 themes before settling on one.

But judging from the screenshot that you have provided, I think that the “users can skip the wizard” statement is a bit misleading. Having a “Not right now” gray text with zero indications that this is an important link/button IS misleading and we all know it. Placing a vague word in a corner of a page will obviously make people ignore that option.

So if this approach were to be adopted, I would prefer that user’s options are obvious and not hidden behind “growth hacking” tactics 🙂

I don’t think you should rely on WooCommerce but do actual proper user testing. Without that you cannot know wether this is a good experience or if it actually leads to more themes that are setup “correctly”. Setting up a shop is normally more complex than switching from posts to a static page. Input from design and accessibility teams would be needed too.

We should also consider that the whole theme experience will change with the second phase of the editing experience, is this something that we want to spend time on and is it something that authors will even be able to use more than 6 months?

I am strongly opposed to letting the theme redirect the user at activation. There are too many ways to activate a theme (admin page, Customizer, Live Preview, database change, theme switcher plugin) to focus on what you would call the “standard” way. And also, the experience of switching back and forth, testing, or reviewing themes becomes a mess. Themes are all about presentation of the front end, so they really shouldn’t need a complicated setup instruction. If they do, there’s something wrong. Walking the user through what you think is the best for them can be quite confusing when it is not what they want.

The wizard takes you through all the necessary steps to set up your site fast

This is called the Customizer, not additional code in each theme.

All of your arguments are for the new user with a new site. But there are many more existing users with existing sites that it would not work well with.

tskk
3:38 pm on October 16, 2018

Why can’t we do it just for when a user downloads the theme from directory to start with?

I’m not entirely against onboarding. I think it can make for a good user experience in some cases.

What I’d lean toward is this being an opt-in rather than opt-out user decision. When a theme is first activated, the user should be presented with an option of using the “step-by-step wizard” for theme setup if they choose to do so.

There can be several different ways of activating themes. Themes shouldn’t auto-redirect and break the user’s expected experience.

Side note: Be careful with permissions. Activating themes, editing theme options, and importing are all separate capabilities.

Opt-in is what we’ve been doing as well and it’s been working wonderfully for us. No one has ever complained and judging by the number of people who’ve installed the demo successfully, I think it’s a great success even if we’re not redirecting on activation.

Thanks a lot for the input, those are some great ideas and I think is important to find a middle-ground where themes can still have a way to provide a guided experience to the user, @acosmin conclusion sounds good.

I personally don’t think that throwing this problem in the plugin territory area as was did in the past is a reasonable solution, since with a plugin or without the challenge and UX is the some.